Regarding Questions 1 & 2:
Yep, the Arduino Dock R2 Omega GPIOs are the exact same as the Expansion and Power Docks. So if you solder on a 30-pin header, you will be able to use Omega Expansions with the Arduino Dock R2!

There is also a direct UART connection between the Omega and ATmega328p chip. We've also fixed some of the sketch flashing issues. Stay tuned for more details.

For question 3:
To gain some features, we had to restrict some of the GPIOs:
There is now a dedicated, hardware controller for SPI and we've added a second UART. Hence the loss of a few GPIOs. We think that the trade-off is definitely worth it though!

@Lazar-Demin really great! thanks 4 that. Onion Omega is one of my favorites IoT Boards, and about the free shipping for backers (in this new campaign)? I really want back (two is better than one) This advantage will be aplied, on my backs (aparts from the free board)?

@Lazar-Demin Glad to hear that! Thanks for adding the UFE connector on this one! The Omega is getting very powerful for its size, and antenna options will make it a smaller alternative for many items already on the market.

@Lazar-Demin Unfortunately there is no pinout(*) description of the new Omega2 on the Kickstarter page - only some marketing shit and idiotic buzzwords ("cloud", "apps", and so on). So please, If you want people to support you, publish decent documentation first!!!

(*) It would be enough if you write down eactly which signals (as referred to in the datasheet) are you making available on the pin-header. (No, we don't need any "fancy" images like for small children. We need the information!)

Also, I would be interested to know if is it possible to build a working OpenWrt for Omega2 from the official OpenWrt sources or whether there are drivers/patches outside the official tree (and if so - are all those patches open-source)? I don't want ANY binary blobs!!!

Also I definitely dislike the Idea that the pre-installed OpenWrt has some proprietary parts which will send data into a "cloud". This really scares me and thus I don't trust your version of OpenWrt at all.

@Butrus-Butrus I understand your concerns, but the Omega2 is still in preproduction so certain things will be different in the production models. It would be pretty disastrous if we prematurely published a pinout and the final product turned out to be different.

However, all of the supported protocols and signals are listed under the The Omega2 comes in two Versions section on the Kickstarter campaign page.

The default OpenWRT can most definitely be installed on the Omega2, and we will be publishing that info in the coming weeks. If you don't see it before the end of the campaign, feel free to reach out to me here.

As for our Cloud services, the Omega is not sending any data to the Cloud, it just lets our servers know that it's online, allowing you (and only you) to manage, remote-control it, and send compiled binaries to it from our online UI at cloud.onion.io
The Cloud was designed for security from the very beginning, so nobody but you can access your transmissions or data.
If you simply don't trust it, the default OpenWRT version doesn't have our Cloud client, so no worries there :)

We are a group of adventurous makers who want to make tools that make it easy for others (and ourselves) to build some awesome projects/devices/gizmos. We definitely welcome all feedback and work hard to incorporate it into our products. The Omega2 is a prime example of that. We hope that you join us on this adventure.